Abstracts S 2

In A Thousand Plateaus Félix Guattari and Gilles
Deleuze describe the equation PLURALISM=MONISM as the magic formula we all
seek“ (TP 20). The paper will discuss William James’ notion of pure experience
and Whiteheads concept of actual entities as answering to this query. From
a Jamesian and Whiteheadian angle the equation of pluralism and monism
requires a fundamental reworking of the notion of subjectivity, precisely in
the way that Guattari has called for in The Three Ecologies: subjectivity
is not be equated with consciousness or the individual, the subject
doesn’t constitute what is given and forms the precondition of experience, but
rather, in an

inversion of modern conceptions, it is the terminus,
the outcome of processes of subjectivation. This also
implies reconsidering the relations between ‘the subject’ and ‘nature’. In
result, for James and Whitehead subjectivity can no longer be confined to
the human. With the concept of actual entities, Whitehead, following William
James and his notion of pure experience, formulates a radically
non-anthropocentric concept of subjectivity, even a metaphysics of a
thousand subjectivities.

I'll just propose certain points of the idea. It will
deal with what Balibar has expressed like an "strategical antinomy",
between a majoritarian strategy and a minoritarian one, antinomy that I would
try to reconstruct through a double confrontation of the guattaro-deleuzian
theory of "devenir-mineur", on the one hand with E. Laclau (strong
illustration of the majoritarian way of course, around the populism topics), on
the other hand with J. Butler (for the minoritarian strategy, but in a way both
close and opposite to the guattaro-deleuzian one – that is to say we should
have do deal here with an antinomy inside the minor strategy itself).

Tomek Sikora, Queer politics as a non-representational
politics of a people (never) to come

The paper proposes an understanding of queer politics
that draws from Deleuzian theorizations of art and aesthetics rather than from
the liberal-legalistic vocabulary of recognition, representation and rights.
Just as an avant-garde artist, by creating modes of signification and
relationality that do not fall into a pre-existing framework of legibility,
addresses a (virtual) audience that is yet to come (and thus faces a high risk
of failure, as the audience may never come to materialize, after all), so –
arguably – queer activism (and queer theory) performs a politics that is “not
the terrain of the representation of a people […] but of their creation,” to use
Nicholas Thoburn’s characterization of the Deleuzo-Guattarian concept of “minor
politics,” i.e. a politics where “the people are missing.” To put my argument
rather formulaically, just as art never ceases to create (ontologically) “queer
objects” (with a broad definition of object), so queer politics never ceases to
create queer “social objects,” i.e. queer practices, subjectivities and
socialities beyond the current liberal-humanist epistemological normativities.
Queer does not and cannot stand for an entity, a “whole“ (such as the figure of
a homosexual or a sexual minority); instead, it is tendency and event, it
resides between the virtual and its actualizations. Closely related to desire,
it defies organic units or taxa and cuts transversally across any received
order of things.

Tomasz Sikora teaches literature, literary theory and
cultural studies at the English Department of the Pedagogical University of
Cracow. In the years 2000-2006 he co-organized a series of conferences that
introduced queer theory into the Polish academic landscape. Three volumes of
essays collected some of the work inspired by the conferences, including A
Queer Mixture (2002) and Out Here: Local and International Perspectives in
Queer Studies (2006). He co-founded and continues to co-edit the online
peer-reviewed journal of queer studies InterAlia (published in English and
Polish), which has run eight issues so far. Sikora has also published Virtually
Wild: Wilderness, Technology and the Ecology of Mediation (2003) and Bodies Out
of Rule: Transversal Readings in Canadian Literature and Film (2014). His main
areas of research and publication include critical and queer theory,
interdisciplinary American and Canadian studies, biopolitics, Deleuze and
Guattari.

Technologies are often seen to be “prosthetic” in that
they are externalizations of bodily organs or functions (e.g., a hammer mimics
my forearm and fist, clothing externalizes the skin, etc.). As Marshall McLuhan
put it, technologies are “the extensions of man”; or in Bernard Steigler’s
words, “as a ‘process of externalization,’ technics is the pursuit of life by
means other than life.” Deleuze was not a philosopher of technology as such,
but he was strongly influenced by the work of Gilbert Simondon and André
Leroi-Gourhan, two of the most profound thinkers of technology in the
twentieth-century. The focus of my intervention will be to propose several
concepts that might help us approach the question of technology in a Deleuzian
vein: prosthesis, proto-technicity, exodarwinism, de-specialization, and
totipotence.

Daniel W. Smith is a Professor in the Department of
Philosophy at Purdue University. He is the translator of Gilles Deleuze’s
Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation and Essays Critical and Clinical (with
Michael A. Greco), and the editor, with Henry Somers-Hall, of the Cambridge
Companion to Deleuze. His book Essays on Deleuze was published by Edinburgh
University Press in 2012.

Smith132@purdue.edu

Gizem Sözen

In Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy,
the principle of the state – which they call the 'state-form' – appears as an
abstract machine of power operating through different concrete manifestations
in history. ‘War machines’ declare war on the very principle of the state and
so they necessarily always operate outside of it. I am interested in the
question of the possibility of a revolutionary war machine that positions
itself against the very principle of the state and that also knows how to deal
with the emergence of the state-form within its domain. Free from the
oppressive principles of the state-form, what kind of a revolutionary movement
can be achieved? Art has been the site of some of the most productive investigations
of this problem. In my paper, I will be looking at the semi-documentary theatre
and essayist documentary videos of Rabih Mroué that comment on the discourse of
martyrdom adopted by the secular revolutionary left during the Civil War. I
will analyze this discourse in terms of its relation to the logic of the
state-form—especially through a consideration of how a left wing party might
turn into “an embryonic State apparatus.” Guattari’s theories on the ‘subjected
group’ and the ‘group-subject’ will guide me in my effort to trace the diagram
of martyrdom in that particular context.

Gizem Sözen is currently a diploma student at the Art
History Program at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. She received
her BA in Sociology from Koc University, Istanbul in 2009 and her MA in Social
and Political Thought Program from York University, Toronto in 2012. Her main
research interest is the question of the state and state-form and the various
forms of resistances and struggles against it. As she made her PhD applications
last term, she is currently struggling to decide if she should pursue her PhD
in Art History or Political Science.

Panagiotis Sotiris,The many encounters of Deleuze and
Marxism (Plenary)

Deleuze and Guattari’s work on schizoanalysis also
represented an important shift towards a dialogue with Marx and his critique of
political economy. However, in the 1970s prominent Marxists attacked Deleuze
(and Guattari) as anti-Marxist. Badiou accused Deleuze of offering a deeply
antidialectical conception of social reality and of class struggle. Poulantzas
accused Deleuze of offering a theory of domination as despotism that
underestimates the analytical primacy of exploitation over domination. This
attitude in a way marked one of the most important missed encounters between
Marxism and other theoretical currents (one can also think of a similar missed
encounter with the work of Foucault). However, things have changed especially
since the 2000s with important contributions that not only bring forward the
deeply political character of Deleuze’s theoretical endeavor, his critique of
capitalist social forms, his conception of social practice and struggle, but
also the linkages with the Marxian and Marxist concepts, exemplified in recent
interventions by writers such as Nicholas Thorbun, Jason Read or Guillaume
Sibertin-Blanc. The aim of this intervention will be to highlight some aspects
of the many dialogues between Deleuze and Marxism.

Panagiotis Sotiris (b. 1970) is currently doing
research at the Laboratory of Arts and Cultural Management of the Department of
Communication and Media Studies at the University of Athens. He has taught
social theory and social and political philosophy at the University of Crete,
Panteion University, the University of the Aegean and the University of Athens.
He has published widely on social philosophy, modern social theory and social
and political developments in Greece. He is author of Communism and Philosophy.
The theoretical adventure of Louis Althusser (in Greek, 2004, Ellinika
Grammata, Athens).

Lines of flight, minorities, and war machines: This
conceptual triptych that is central to the whole project of schizoanalysis
defines, in a certain manner, the contours of the possibility of a Deleuzian
politics. Contrary to a conception that there can be no Deleuzian politics, but
also contrary to the perception that Deleuzian politics represent only a
micro-politics of fragmented and inherently minoritarian struggles, the purpose
of this presentation is to suggest that we can think politics after Deleuze in
a more complex way. In this reading, not only is Deleuze’s thinking deeply
political, but also the politics implicit in this conception offer a very
complex way to rethink the constant effectivity of social antagonism, the
recurring effects of struggles and resistances, the continuous recomposition of
collective social subjects. In light of these, and using a concept from Louis
Althusser’s attempt from the 1970s onwards to reformulate a ‘materialism the
encounter’, the challenge is ‘how to organize the encounters’, namely to
articulate singular struggles, resistances, experimentations, into ‘lasting
encounters’ and broader counter-hegemonic projects, without negating their
singular or ‘minoritarian’ character. In sharp contrast to the dismissal of the
Deleuzian project by Marxists in the 1970s, this presentation wants to suggest
that both Deleuze’s (and Guattari’s) confrontation with the ‘molecular’
foundations of capitalist relations of production and their attempt to think
the singular practices of resistance, antagonism and creativity in the
plurality of their forms, indeed offer –even in their tentative and uneven
character– important starting points for a politics of emancipation.

Panagiotis Sotiris (b. 1970) is currently doing
research at the Laboratory of Arts and Cultural Management of the Department of
Communication and Media Studies at the University of Athens. He has taught
social theory and social and political philosophy at the University of Crete,
Panteion University, the University of the Aegean and the University of Athens.
He has published widely on social philosophy, modern social theory and social
and political developments in Greece. He is author of Communism and Philosophy.
The theoretical adventure of Louis Althusser (in Greek, 2004, Ellinika
Grammata, Athens).

Embodied, dissensual affects materialize; this
disarticulates and disorganizes (implicit and explicit) ways of being.
Nonetheless, in such disorganization lies political potential. However, there
seems to be no way to harness affects – ephemeral and unrepresentable
sensations – in the interests of radical (but not fascistic) democratic action.
This dilemma is rooted in part in the sharp distinctions made by Gilles Deleuze
between affect and emotion, and his failure to attend to embodied flows between
micropolitics and macropolitics. Deleuze’s experimentation involves rethinking
the political but he does little to facilitate radical politics understood as
acting in concert to further freedom for all. In this paper, I will focus how
visceral affects can contribute to cultivating responsive relations and
inspiring radical political projects. I do this by drawing on what might be
considered an unlikely source – the writings of Simone de Beauvoir. Focusing on
her political fiction, The Blood of Others, I trace how the implicit
transmission of affects between embodied subjects, as distinct from the making
of conscious choices, actually fosters responsiveness, builds social ties, and
contributes to activist politics.

Aris Stilianou studied philosophy at the Aristotle
University of Thessaloniki. He did his Master at the Paris-IV University and
received his PhD from Paris-I at Sorbonne. He has taught at the Department of
Journalism and Mass Media (1995-1997) and Philosophy and Pedagogy (1997-2002),
and at the Department of Political Sciences of the Aristotle University of
Thessaloniki from 2002 onwards. He is assistant Professor of Political
Philosophy. His research interests include political philosophy and history of
philosophy, as well as translation. He has translated and edited many
philosophical texts, from Latin and French into modern Greek. His publications
include: Histoire et politique chez Spinoza, Atelier National de Reproduction
des Thèses, (Lille, 1994). «Spinoza et le temps historique», Les Études
Philosophiques (1997). «Spinoza et l’histoire antique», Studia Spinozana
(2001). Social Contract Theories. From Grotius to Rousseau (Polis, Athens 2006,
in Greek). «Sulla funzione politica degli esempi storici in Spinoza», Storia
politica della moltitudine. Spinoza e la modernita, Derive Approdi (Rome 2009).
«Historicité, multitude et démocratie», Astérion, 10 (2012). He has edited:
«Spinoza: Towards Freedom. Ten Contemporary Greek Essays», Axiologika, special
issue 2 (Exantas, Athens 2002, in Greek), and «The Classical Rationalism»,
Ypomnima sti Philosophia, issue 7 (Polis, Athens, May 2008, in Greek).

To enter into the Deleuzean conceptual plateau of
style is to discover in many ways the very processes of difference and
repetition, hence the very movement of ritournelles. On the one hand, in a
range of texts, Deleuze emphasizes repeatedly that style functions as “a kind
of foreign language” within one’s own language, but also that “difference and
repetition are the two inseparable and correlative puissances of essence”
(Proust 49). On the other hand, the very range of texts in which Deleuze
considers style points also to a range of domains in which styles operate and
vary, most notably in philosophy itself, in literary expression, and as what
Deleuze calls, in Negotiations, as writing as “an attempt to make life
something more than personal, to free life from what imprisons it,” adding
“Creating isn’t communicating but resisting” (Negotiations 143). In many ways,
these reflections from Negotiations (complementing the longer discussion of
style in L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze from 1988, at the same time as the
Negotiations interview) sum up succinctly the differences and repetitions of
Deleuze on style throughout his career. Thus, in the context of the multi-faceted
thematics of the Athens conference, I will reflect on the Deleuzian concept of
style in terms of its necessarily mutating ways of adapting to the challenges
of resistance and freedom.

Charles J. Stivale is Distinguished Professor of
French at Wayne State University, Detroit MI USA. Besides writing in the field
of nineteenth-century French literature, he has written two books on Deleuze
(The Two-fold Thought of Deleuze & Guattari, 1998; Gilles Deleuze's ABCs:
The Folds of Friendship, 2008); edited and co-edited two volumes on Deleuze,
co-translated Logique du sens, and translated the text of the eight-hour video
interview, L'Abecedaire de Gilles Deleuze, for subtitles in the zone 1 DVD,
Gilles Deleuze, From A to Z (MIT/Semiotext(e), 2012).

Engin Sustam wrote his Master thesis:
"Reading the social in the global system and minor politics" at Mimar
Sinan Fine Arts University. In 2005, he wrote his second Master thesis:
"Trauma and forced migration in modern Kurdish literature after 1990s
Post-war period, Turkey" at Ecoles
des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales - EHESS, Department of Political
Sociology. In 2012 he wrote his dissertation on "Kurdish subaltern culture
and contemporary art in Turkey: deviation, interpenetration and
deterritorialization" at EHESS. His dissertation project is being prepared
for publication at L' Harmattan publishing based in Paris. Engin Sustam is an Assistant Professor in the
Department of Sociology at İstanbul Arel University since 2013. He also
prepares a seminar course for İstanbul Galatasaray University for academic year
2015-2016. (Seminar’s name: Subject and deterritorialisation) Recently, he is
problematizing violence, new revolt movements and post-totalitarism. Professor
Sustam has an interdisciplinary approach with focus on, political philosophy
and psychoanalysis. Among his publicised works are “Global Revolt Movements and Bio-political Domination” by Wiener Verlag
für Sozialforschung Publication, (April 2015, Vienna-Wien), “Kurdish Subaltern culture and
Contemporary art in Turkey”, by L’Harmattan Publication -Paris, “Reading
Violence and Revolt Movement in the Middle East” in the review: Teorik
Bakış-Istanbul, “The social content of conspiracy theories” in the review
Teorik Bakış-İstanbul, “Rethinking Foucault: Biopolitics and
Post-totalitarianism” by Minör Publications, “Nostalgia of Ottoman Empire and
security discourse of state at the age of Biopolitics " in the review Rose
de Personne-Paris /Hatmattan, “Micropolitical dynamics of the revolt movements
and politics of dissensus” by Metis Publications-İstanbul, “The subject to
Subaltern: Kurdish Cultural Studies and Memory“ in Çizgi Kitabevi
Publication-Turkey, “Memory, Narration and reterritorialization: cultural
expressions and identity expressions in exile ” by Bordeaux University
Publications-MSHA. Sustam is interested in sociology,
philosophy and arts, his research areas are Postcolonial
Studies, Kurdish Studies, Art Theory, Philosophy and sociology of Art,
Subaltern Studies, Deleuze Studies, Foucault Studies, Poststructuralist
Philosophy, New Revolt Movements, Microsociology, Subculture Studies, etc.
Currently, he writes for L’İntempestive, La Rose de Personne-Paris, Teorik
Bakış-Istanbul, Art-İst actual-modern-Istanbul, Duvar and Dipnot-İstanbul
reviews and is an editorial member of the same reviews.

Ass. Prof. Sociology, İstanbul Arel University, Ph.D, EHESS-Paris

enginsustam@outlook.fr

Grazyna Swietochowska, The Scope, Definition and
Effect of the Deterritorialization Feature in Audio-visual European Film Theory

I can name the methodological specificity of my work an
"excavations" practice in a "non mother-father" narrative
cinematic material. With reference to Guattari's and Deleuze's works i
established a model of an archaeological practice of interpretation, because of
the image that is always a stratificated one.I found the primary source for
this creative research in Thousand Plateaus and observed how these diagnosed
data operate links with the ensuing stages of reflection on audiovisual
culture. Following the post-Deleuzian thought of Laura K. Marks, I outlined a
map of selected cinematic texts orientated in haptic material of film image?
haptic is a better suited word than "tactile" since it does not
establish an opposition between two sense organs, but rather invites the
assumption that the eye itsel may fulfill this non-optical function. They are
dimensions of consuming and devouring (physical gesture masking/reproducing
different layers of archaeological image). This is the case in the following
films: Sun in a net, dir.Stefan Uher (1962), Diamonds of the Night, dir. Jan
Nemec (1966), Daisies, dir. Dusan Hansk (1969). The sound, topology of sound,
the case of sounds' displacement, sound/talking/ musical counterpoint are the
other faces of the same superior parameter of deterritorializations as a
subject of the Eastern European cinema? I am following geological layers of one
of the possible examples of minor cinema to get to the invisible dimensions of
the collective audiovisual archive. Sound and visual anti-regime have still got
something in common with the crystal image, a notion entered actually by
Guattari's crystal of time, and defined by him as a ritornello par excellence
(Deleuze, 1989: 92).